10 - Relevance Theory, schemas and deductive inference

Summary

We have dealt with four pragmatic theories: speech act theory, conversational analysis developed from it, Gricean pragmatics and his co-operative principle, and Leech's politeness theory. The last two of these, and even more Sperber and Wilson, who developed the pragmatic theory known as Relevance Theory (RT) discussed in this chapter, emphasise that encoding and decoding are seldom sufficient for linguistic communication. Sperber and Wilson argue that the linguistic code may not even be necessary.

For example, imagine I am in Laos in 1974 when the Royal Lao troops and the anti-American Pathet Lao communists are in a power-sharing government. Walking through the countryside, I am detained by communist troops who think I'm American. I studied Russian a long time ago, but can only remember one sentence: “Когда темнеет, мы закрываем шторы” meaning ‘when it gets dark we draw the curtains’. I utter this sentence, which convinces the communists I am Russian, and they release me. Although I use language to communicate I am Russian, I only employed an utterance act, not a coded propositional act. If I had, I might have died long ago in a communist mental hospital. Nevertheless, I communicated what I intended (cf. Searle 1969: 44–5).